[maemo-developers] Assuring quality in extras (was Re: Beware)

[From: Frank Banul]

What about making the system able to help the user identify the
problem? In your specific example, consider battery usage. I think it
would be very beneficial if the tablet by default could show usage
history as well as battery charge over time. When the user charges
their dead tablet, they can look at the history of usage and find out
that it was that new whiz bang extras program that consumed 80% of the
last battery charge.

Without adequate information, the user doesn't have any choice but to
blame the "Nokia tablet". But given memory usage, disk usage and
battery usage information would help the user understand what might be
going wrong.

I think this could be combined with more automated testing of the
extras packages for blatant violations but ultimately I think giving
more insight as to what's happening on the tablet would be more useful
and catch more problems.

And the last angle that I can think of would be in the development
tools. There are analysis tools available to show memory usage, etc.
Maybe the extras repository can run some of them on uploads and
provide the results back to the author? Or maybe require the author
submit the results of running the analysis tools before upload?

That's all that comes to mind at the moment.

Frank

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
> The discussion about the potentially buggy extras package is a good
> starting point to a discussion about how quality should be addressed in
> Fremantle extras.
>
> We have started this discussion many times but never got to conclusions.
>
> The fact is that the good work done by the community working on the
> extras content and infrastructure is convincing Maemo SW that the extras
> repository should be activated by default, being part of the offering
> Maemo 5 users will have since day 1.
>
> All this should result in much bigger number of downloads and real users
> enjoying those apps. But if then something goes wrong e.g. an applet
> draining a battery... The negative effect is also more visible in basd
> press, calls to Nokia Care, units returned and etc, since all what most
> users see is "my Nokia Something worked before but now it doesn't".
>
> The extras process introduced in Diablo has been useful improving the
> quality assurance but 'packages that build' is not enough. What else
> could be done?
>
> There are some vague ideas listed at
> https://wiki.maemo.org/Extras_repository_process_definition#Quality_Assurance
>
> --
> Quim Gil
> marketing manager, open source
> Maemo Software @ Nokia
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